Seeed Studio矽递科技

Seeed Studio (矽递科技) is one of the companies that made Shenzhen famous among makers. You probably know their Grove sensor modules and XIAO boards. They also run Seeed Fusion, a custom-manufacturing service where anyone can upload a board design and get back PCBs, assembled PCBAs, stencils, CNC parts or 3D prints, with no minimum order.

The story starts in 2008 in an apartment. Founder Eric Pan studied electronic engineering and worked as a product engineer at an Intel chipset factory. Then he quit, spent three months cycling across China, and discovered Arduino. He loved the openness of that community and started selling open-source modules and parts to makers from home. The business grew past US$30 million in revenue and 200 staff. Along the way Seeed opened Chaihuo, Shenzhen's first makerspace, in 2011, brought Maker Faire to the city in 2012 (more than 500,000 visitors since), and Pan co-founded the hardware accelerator HAXLR8R. His take on manufacturing: "The future will not be bigger factories, but smaller, more agile ones."

Fusion is that idea turned into a service. Seeed builds its own modules at volume, so it keeps a big stock of components in Shenzhen, and it opens that stock to customers through the Open Parts Library (OPL). In 2020 the OPL grew from about 20,000 parts to more than 150,000. If your design uses OPL parts, turnkey PCB assembly takes as little as seven working days, and there are Eagle libraries on GitHub so you can design with those parts from the start. Beyond boards, Fusion does stencils, CNC machining, 3D printing and custom versions of Seeed's own hardware.

Seeed's mission is making technology accessible. Most of its customers are overseas, and ordering, payment and support are all online in English. The company has moved from modules to devices to integrated solutions and today focuses on edge AI, robotics and sensor systems, so Fusion customers are ordering from a company that ships its own hardware worldwide.

Seeed Fusion suits makers, researchers and startups who want quick-turn PCBs and small-batch PCBA with parts already on the shelf in Shenzhen, and teams building on Seeed modules who want a custom version. Big programmes that need full enclosure development and box build may need a dedicated contract manufacturer too.